Europe must not meddle with our stamp of quality

'We are not required to state our nation's name on our stamps because we invented the modern postal system. They are identified only by the Monarch's head.'

There are many monuments to the breathtaking age when these cramped islands dominated the world, politically, militarily, scientifically and economically.

These include Greenwich Mean Time – and this country’s unique postage stamps.

Alone in all the world, we are not required to state our nation’s name on our stamps because we invented the modern postal system. They are identified only by the Monarch’s head.

This arrangement even survived Tony Benn’s period as Postmaster General nearly 50 years ago, when he tried to erase the Queen. She successfully objected and public opinion was behind her.

But in those days we were a fully ind¬ependent country and such matters were our own affair.

Now there is a new threat to the Royal head. It results, like so many other unwelcome changes to our mail system, from two European Union ¬directives requiring ‘liberalisation’ of this lucrative business.

These directives have already devastated the Royal Mail by forcing it to hand over its most profitable business to private competitors. They also took away much of its staple trade, such as the handling of TV licences.

And they limited the British -Government’s ability to subsidise much-loved but unprofitable post offices which have since closed in large numbers.

Now comes the full privatisation of the Royal Mail, almost certainly with majority ownership by a foreign concern. Suddenly, as the Postal Services Bill nears -completion, MPs have realised that we can no longer assume that a commercial – and probably German – company will necessarily respect the old conventions.

Buckingham Palace is rightly perturbed by the idea of the Queen’s head being used in unpredictable ways to promote a foreign business which has no special loyalty to our institutions.

MPs and Ministers are rightly worried that the disappearance of the Queen from the stamps would be correctly understood by the public as a powerful symbol of national decline.

All should recognise that it is time they addressed the real problem – our repeated failure to recognise the nature, meaning and extent of European integration.

Not a vintage moment

NEVER let it be said that the British ¬Government does not try its hardest to keep its most precious secrets. But these secrets do not concern missiles and it was not our foreign enemies they wanted to keep them from. It was the voters.

The Foreign Office, still famous for its past employees’ willingness to hand over bundles of vital information to the Kremlin, fought like a tiger to prevent The Mail on Sunday from revealing what lies in its wine cellar.

And what a cellar it turns out to be, with luscious, dusty old bottles of port, claret and Burgundy set aside in special corners for the delight of approved top-grade -politicians and their equally top-grade guests – few of whom could afford anything more splendid than the house red if they were paying for themselves.

Political office should not mean privilege. They should sell the lot, and get their wine from the supermarket, like everyone else.

And perhaps they could use the money saved to rescue the Navy’s Harriers from the scrapheap.

Happy Christmas to all

IN this time of cuts and crisis, sleet and frost, the warmth and generosity of Christianity’s happiest festival are specially welcome. A very Happy Christmas – and let’s keep calling it that – to all our readers.